To the Lawrence Academy Family,
I reach out to you feeling both the power of the present moment and the pull of history. A school, particularly a high school, has a way of capturing the fullness of life both for the individual and the institution. It is important in this time of strain to state that Lawrence Academy is here for you, serving the growth and health of those in our care and aiming for the greater good.
Like all of you over the last weeks, we have gone through the unanticipated and complex process of first powering down our normal living and then planning up a whole new way of living. As a place so rich in young energy and life, this process has been particularly intense. While it has been challenging, something about our basic identity and beliefs has helped us.
Our particular work and focus, even on the most ordinary day, is living and learning in a period of intense personal transformation—we embrace that work. As I wrote to the faculty as we were in the midst of these radical transitions, “the best thing we can do for our students and for our community is to recreate a sense of engagement, togetherness, routine, and personal progress.”
Pursuing stability, support, and inspiration is nothing new to our faculty or our community. In less urgent times establishing a sense of purpose, connecting with each other powerfully, and using the regularity of routine to ground and deepen experience were common efforts, but no less noble in their intent.
While we understand in a new way the importance of our community and the good it serves, we know our fundamental attitude towards young people and towards the power of our mission supporting them is unchanged. In that spirit, I want to share with our extended Lawrence Academy family a message I sent to parents, students, faculty, and staff.
The message was sent on what would have been the last day of Winterim—a day on which we have traditionally celebrated and shared so much. As we live through this powerful experience—this moment of learning between life as we knew it and life as we will come to know it again—it is important to recall our common purpose:
We all find ourselves in the powerful situation of having an immediate and tangible effect on the well-being of all those around us. Never before have we understood so clearly how our own actions affect others. Individuals, families, and communities all have both the opportunity and the responsibility to act for the common welfare.
At Lawrence Academy, we believe our mission of self-recognition, inspiration, and self-agency ultimately aims towards the greater good, and I ask every member of our extended community—faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni and all within our reach— to act with strength and conviction. We will take care of each other and the world around us.
At Lawrence Academy we have always believed that the force of education and the growth of young people simply will not be contained by classroom walls. As a school that came into being following the American Revolution, that passed through Civil War and World Wars, that grew through all the disruptions and advances of modernity—as a school committed to a fundamental hope in the future—we know that even today’s hard experiences will lead to stronger commitment of identity and purpose—will lead to the greater good.
We will return to our beautiful normal, our common experience, but we will use this moment to learn all we can to grow towards a future that will need our care more than ever before, just as it always has.
Wishing you well-being and strength,
Dan Scheibe
Head of School
Lawrence Academy
